Safari 4 (beta)

That's why you back stuff up. I'd not attempt to recover all the files, just
those which weren't on backup and which couldn't be easily reconstituted. I'd
just wipe the drive, restore from the backup, and drive on. That's why I love
Time Machine: at worst I can lose one hour's data. At home I do a clone of my
boot volume every week or so, and before I make a major change in the system.
This means that I _have_ a known working system at most a week old, and I
have backups at most an hour old, in the event that there's a problem. And
having stuff on several different physical drives means that there would have
to be a _serious_ problem before it affected _everything_. And, of course,
the external drives can be plugged into _any machine in the building_, all of
which have FireWire. Including the Windows boxes.

 

I've had computing access from home since the early 1960s, originally on
terminals connected to mainframes and since roughly 1980 I've had a variety
of Apple and IBM computers. But I do indeed have memories of those 5 & 1/4
and 8 inch floppies. As an aside it was apparently late in the game that
Apple decided to go with the Sony floppies instead of 5 and 1/4 in the Mac.

 

i have several external drives like that too, although they are all
firewire (usb is not reliable for bus-power). however, i certainly
don't want to deal with an external drive on an airplane, let alone
several of them. i also like to use the laptop on a couch or bed and
having even one hard drive dangling off of it is simply not going to
work.

basically, using external hard drives on a portable computer
effectively turns it into a non-portable computer.

on my desktop mac, i have several external hard drives, as well as a
dvd burner, ipod dock, flash card reader and a printer and it's an
absolute mess of power and firewire/usb cables.

 

I use Time Machine too, but the way I use it I might loose a lot more
than one hour's data! You see I normally have my TM drive disconnected
and powered off so I have to manually connect it every time I want to do
a backup, and I get lazy. I keep it disconnected for at least three
reasons:

1) It is about 10 times as loud as my iMac!
2) To save energy
3) In case my iMac is somehow compromised (unlikely)

To elaborate on the last point, what if a rogue process gains UID 0 on
my machine? It could corrupt my boot drive, but if I realised something
was wrong in time I would just have to reinstall from DVD and recover
from my TM drive. If the TM drive was permanently connected the rogue
process could modify data on there and I would not be able to trust my
backup.

Of course I could get a quieter drive, and provided it only spins up
once per hour it would not use much energy (but I seem to remember it
spinning up more often than that, even after disabling SpotLight
indexing of it?).

If I leave the house for more than a day I store the TM drive offsite in
case of fire etc. I am trying to remember to do occasional backups of my
important data to optical media for permanent offsite storage.

Ian

 

When you restore from a Time Machine drive, you are given the
opportunity to choose by time and date the backup to be restored; you
don't have to take the most recent one.

 

Yes but the rogue process wouldn't be limited to modifying the most
recent one either! It could simply wipe the whole drive, or it could
subtly corrupt every backup.

When I was responsible for backups on Solaris servers the archive tapes
were taken out of the drive and stored in a fireproof safe. It just
seems a little risky to have all your archives stored on a live disk.

Ian

 

Well, if we're having _that_ kind of contest, I've got all 4 bays of the
Mac Pro filled (the original 250, plus 3 325s) and a terabyte LaCie on
the desk for backups and the oul' Woman has her 200 (I think) in the
MacBook Pro with a LaCie 250 on the deskt for her various bits and
pieces. I've also got a hosed LaCie (Maxtor) 120 that's about ten years
old I'll probably put a 500 into when I get a round tuit.

The original 250 in bay 1 I use for "restoring" my boot drive once in a
while.

 

http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html

 

You win.

 

There was an article in one of the online computer articles
(comuterworld I think) that said that of all the browsers, Safari
falls to hackers the quickest

mk5000

"In the auditorium
Looking on she sings the songs
The words she knows, the tune she hums
But oh how it feels so real "--tiny danza, elton john

 

I believe that that that article exists solely in your imagination,
troll.

 

Why? You believe Computerworld is totally free of idiots?

 

Why? You believe Computerworld is totally free of idiots?[/QUOTE]

It doesn't matter what publication she (or he) would have hypothesized;
I think she's a troll.

Why else would she have added alt.usenet.legends.lester-mosley to the
distribution?

 

You're probably thinking of the prediction by a guy who pwned Safari
last year at CanSecWest's "PWN2OWN" contest that it would be the most
easily hacked browser this year. His claim did receive a bit of play
in the past week and appeared in ComputerWorld among other places.

<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic
&articleId=9128878>

Of course, CanSecWest 2009 hasn't happened yet... so we'll see.
However, last year this guy won $10,000 by showing up with an exploit
that broke Safari in the first few minutes of the contest. He is
apparently planning to show up with exploits again, meaning he's found
them ahead of time, so I'd say he's fairly credible.

Apple fixed the problem he found last year within a month, and it was
not transparent (requiring a user to accept the install) and never
appeared in the wild. If Apple responds quickly to any vulnerabilities
found, I'd say that focused attention on Safari from hackers can only
improve it.

 

Now now, a person with an IQ of 50 could not possibly be as stupid as
the average Republican. It takes active _misuse_ of one's Dog given
brains to be *that* stupid. Having low IQ isn't a moral failing after
all.

 

I could lose 100 points and still be ahead of the average Republican.

The "average" Republican and the "average" Democrat are both smart
enough not to make stupid statements like that. It's the extremists
in both parties that like to make idiots of themselves.